This is exceedingly late (don't check the forums often), but for what it's worth

you have to use the "GLOBAL" Highlights and do a lot of adding to efficiently use highlights in Avalon (if you want to have all your avatars have access to those highlights). This is the third tab over from the left. Using the Group field makes this a lot easier to organize (I usually click on the the text strings sort then on the group string sort to make life easier).

"HIGHLIGHTS" is for the highlights for a particular character. My cleric has "copper alloy" highlighted, while my empath doesn't care about that. Use this for the really particular things a given avatar wants to notice.

Finally, for some reason, Avalon eats highlights settings whenever the server is acting up. Make sure that, every week and without fail, you make of copy of the Global Highlights.plist file, located here: Hard Drive/Users/<<UserName>>/Library/Preferences/GS folder . I did not and spent a delightful 6 hours on two days re-entering data.

I'm pretty sure this file is usually made into an invisible file by OS9 and later (because Apple is now adopting the same approach that drove me away from Windows regarding how users should use their machines). Here are my notes on how to reveal hidden files. Please remember this is DANGEROUS and will mightily annoy the mac assist reps on the help line, so be very careful when doing this - fiddling with hidden files can go south fast.

View Hidden Files in the Finder
The Finder does offer an option to view hidden files. However, this isn’t a graphical option — you have to enable it with a terminal command and restart the Finder for your changes to take effect.

To view hidden files in the Finder, open a Terminal window (Terminal should be located in the Utilities folder) and run the following commands in it, pressing Enter after each one:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder


Close the Terminal window and close all windows, then re-open them and hidden files should be showing. Check with the Apple website for how to make them all hidden again (I have opted not to - so far, so good).

Macros are usually located in character folders - let's say your avatar is named "Biggus", then look for a folder titled "Biggus" and the macros should be located there. Not a bad idea to back those up periodically, too, but they seem to be way more stable that the GlobalHighlights.plist file.

Hope this actually helps in some way.